September 25th, 2017

This week we welcome Mariatta Wijaya (@mariatta) as our PyDev of the Week! Mariatta is the co-chair of the PyCascades conference, a regional Python conference taking place in Vancouver, BC. She is also a core developer of the Python programming language. She does automation and web development for a movie company, so she also shows up in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). You can check out what open source projects she is active in over on Github.

September 25th, 2017

Ned Batchelder’s coverage.py is a foundation of the Python testing ecosystem. It is solid, well maintained, and does its job extremely well. I think literally every Python project that cares about testing should be using it.

But it’s not without its faults. Specifically, its performance can be quite bad. On some workloads it’s absolutely fine, but on others you can see anything up to an order of magnitude slow down (and this is just on CPython. On pypy it can … Read the rest

September 25th, 2017

PyLadies is an international mentorship community for women that use Python. Started with a grant in 2011, PyLadies has continued to bring women into the Python community through a variety of methods, including hosting events in local PyLadies chapters as well as offering a grant opportunity to attend PyCon. One woman in particular has contributed to PyLadies’ success, for which the PSF recognized her as a Community Service Award recipient for the 2nd Quarter of 2017:

September 24th, 2017

Some while ago I got a new wifi-capable camera. Of course, it has some awful proprietary system for actually transferring images to a real computer. Fortunately, it’s all based on a needlessly complex HTTP interface which can fairly easily be driven by any moderately capable HTTP client. I played around with FlashAero a bit first but it doesn’t do quite what I want out of the box and the code is a country mile from anything I’d like to hack … Read the rest

September 24th, 2017

These are my notes on using some MicroPython specific tools in relation to a ESP32-DevKitC board.

There are many tutorials and youtube videos that constantly encourage users to install tools and packages into their system-level libraries. (If you need to use sudo when you pip install foo, you are installing it as a system level library.) Please, Please, Please take the time to learn the basics of virtual environment. If you are a developer/hacker/maker – save yourself … Read the rest

September 23rd, 2017

We live in a hobby-rich world. There is no shortage of pastimes to grow a passion for. There is a shortage of one thing: time to indulge those passions. If you’re someone who pours your heart into that one thing that makes your life worthwhile, that’s a great deal. But, what if you’ve got no shortage of interests that draw your attention and you realize you will never have the time for all of them?

September 23rd, 2017

I gave a talk at Boston Python the
other night. It started as an exposition of thepoint matching algorithm
I’ve previously written about on this blog. But as I thought about my side
project more, I was interested to talk about the challenges I faced while
building it. Not because the specifics were so interesting, but because they
were typical problems that all software projects face.

And in particular, I wanted to underscore this point: software is hard, even… Read the rest